SOURCE: Fine, Laura. “Going Nowhere Slow: The Post-South World of Bobbie-Ann Mason.” Southern Literary Journal 32, no. 1 (fall 1999): 87-97.

In the following essay, Fine asserts that the Southern locale itself is tangential to Bobbie Ann Mason's fiction and that she concentrates instead on her characters' search for meaning in the wider context of pop culture.

In his 1930 story “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner depicts a South in painful transition. The Old South, with its history of slavery, racism, and cruelty masked by a genteel front, battles the forces of the New South, mercantile, unconcerned with beauty. In Flannery O'Connor's stories, the South is peopled by shallow, narrow-minded whites, representatives of both the New and Old South, who assume a superiority based on their race while demonstrating a gaping ignorance of their shortcomings. O'Connor uses her bladelike humor to teach her smug characters important lessons, the ultimate being that...